dispatchEvent() Blog™

After spending hours wrangling with my ant build script and finally making everything work correctly, I am convinced of two things:

1. ant is a very powerful tool for compiling code but it can also do so much more.
2. The support for ant for flex online is abysmally frustrating.

So, I’d love to share with you some of the tips I’ve picked up after tweaking my script to the point where it finally worked!

Introducing ant

First of all, let me introduce the basics of what ant is. I couldn’t really say it better than the thousands of nameless editors of WikiPedia.

Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes. It is similar to Make but is implemented using the Java language, requires the Java platform, and is best suited to building Java projects.

The most immediately noticeable difference between Ant and Make is that Ant uses XML to describe the build process and its dependencies, whereas Make has its Makefile format. By default the XML file is named build.xml.

Ant is an Apache project. It is open source software, and is released under the Apache Software License.

So in short, ant lets you use an XML based script to run a series of commands typically used to build software projects. It was originally designed to be “for Java, in Java” but it’s popularity and ease of use has created interest beyond the Java community. For flex, ant can be used for compiling ActionScript and Flex projects into SWFs, creating SWC files, generating documentation with ASDocs, and other actions associated with compiling.

There are a lot of great tutorials online that can cover the basics of how ant works so I’m not going to go into a general overview in this article. Instead, I’m going to try to focus on some of the practical aspects of getting a build set up when working with Flex. However, here are some links to the official ant documentation some helpful tutorials for the basics:

Ant Basics tutorial

Another basics tutorial (this time for Flex)

Official Flex documentations

Ant Folklore

After the jump, I’ll get into some of the ways that ant can be useful for Flash and Flex projects.

Applications for Flex users

Is ant right for you? It depends. For most cases, using the standard Run and Debug functions in FlashBuilder or Flash will be completely sufficient. However, if you work on a large development team or on a project with a complicated build process, it might save the group a lot of headache. Here’s a list of situations where I think Flex ant tasks can be helpful.

• Whenever your project requires you to make adjustments to the standard build process. For example, when you need to add additional flags to your compiler string.
• For Flex projects that are distributed widely, e.g. open source projects, where the configuration of the users’ dev environment is unknown. Build scripts allow users of various versions of FlexBuilder, FDT, or Flex SDK users on different operating systems to all be able to compile a project with more or less the same settings.
• If running or building your project requires you to configure options in the command line or to run a local server.
• For building release versions of an app and for deploying your app. For example, compiling, zipping and copying an app to a server using FTP.
• When you’re a total nerd and you want to use ant just so you can say you did it.

Beyond Compiling

One of the main benefits of using ant is that I think many people are unaware of is that it can be used for many things beyond running compilers. For example, in KitchenSync, I use a build script to create a temp folder, compile a SWC file into the temp folder, create an SVN export of the source folder into the temp folder, zip the source and SWC and name it with the current version number, then delete the temp folder.

There are loads of core tasks that are already defined within the ant library. They handle all types of common actions in the command line. There are even additional optional tasks that add higher-level functionality like copying files to a server using SSH or validating an XML file. Finally, additional tasks can be added simply by creating a new Java class that is a subclass of org.apache.tools.ant.Task. You probably won’t do this yourself, but there are a number of third-party programs that have created ‘plug-in’ tasks for ant such as SVN.

Once Flex projects became larger and more complex, many users began to look for more customizable options and began using ant. A couple of years back, Adobe released some official ant tasks which can now be found bundled in every version of the Flex SDK. However, as I said before the documentation of exactly how to get these tasks running is vague at best.

In part 2, I’ll talk about the details of getting flex ant tasks running.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

Tags: ant, flashbuilder, Flex, flexbuilder, java, svn, tasks

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Flex, Tips, Tricks, and Hacks, Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.